Fear distorted time.
It happened over and over again in the days preceding the meeting, and it eventually reached the point where Cerea realized she needed some means of tracking the true. A few hours of both waiting for sunset and trying to swallow back any portion of her guilt, and then she reluctantly asked the little knight for help again. It would be Cerea's money, because the training salary was still coming (and she was having a hard time finding places to secure the little bags) -- but she couldn't go out to shop. And it meant asking her only friend to be awake during strange hours, venturing across the city on Cerea's behalf while searching for something which might not even exist...
It did.
The timepiece had been manufactured by minotaurs: it had been the easiest way to acquire something which was made to go around a wrist. The girl had been careful in articulating that part of the request: an item created to encircle the diameter of an ankle wouldn't really work for her, and when it came to the typical alternative... in her opinion, few things looked stupider than a centaur fishing something out of a breast pocket, plus Ms. Garter hadn't been making those anyway. Additionally, her current skirts came with a similar lack of storage, she really didn't want to give multiple ponies the experience of watching her fish something out of her cleavage (which could take so long as to turn the question into 'What time is it now?'), and she quickly realized that just like nearly every other adolescent in the world, she'd become far too used to simply glancing at her phone's screen.
So it was a wristwatch and in that alone, it could be described as similar to what she'd had in the herd. But the gaps had scavenged what they could from what humans no longer wanted, and that meant the majority of personal timepieces had been cheap plastic: single-line flashing digital displays with two tiny side buttons controlling nine supposed functions, none of which worked out to 'Set Current Time.' They were barely functional, fell apart under the force of a hard stare, and it was best not to ask about the ones which claimed calculator functions -- but on the rather dubious plus side, they were cheap and plentiful. They had to be, because you generally wound up replacing them every ten days or after one drop of moisture, whichever came first. Which presumed the corroding inner battery held up that long.
Compared to what she'd known, the current piece was a wristwatch in the same way a native of France could look at a KV Mini parked next to a Bugatti EB 110 and say, with a mostly-straight face, that they were both cars.
It was a wristwatch: that couldn't be denied. It also had the option to be something other, because it came with a long, strangely-flexible cord of braided metal, along with the option to remove the thick fabric straps in such a way as to make it look like they'd never been there at all. Cerea had initially considered that the design was meant to provide minotaurs with a pocket option, and had continued to do so right up until the moment when she'd actually picked the timepiece up.
It was heavy for a watch: at least a sixth of a kilo. It had a flip-up lid covering the face, and a pair of little steel domes moved when she pushed her finger against the tab: layered protection.
The metal tines were driven by clockwork alone, and that was part of the reason for both thickness and weight: there wasn't a single spell involved in the watch's function. That aspect was something else she'd asked for, if it was possible at all. She would be carrying the sword, and while she generally trusted herself not to be clumsy -- things happened in battle. Even if the blade wasn't turned against her, it was possible to reach for it in such a way as to have a wrist scrape against the hilt. Clockwork meant no chance of disruption (other than that caused by impact), and that made it safe.
The watch kept surprisingly accurate time. According to the little knight (who was passing along the seller's assessment, and also had to read out the instruction manual), it lost about a second during each usage cycle -- which in this case meant two days, because it also came with a little key: the clockwork had to be regularly wound.
Cerea had carefully examined the purchase. Noted the little touches, like the fact that there were fully-unnecessary spiraling lathe patterns spun into the inner surface of the metal, simply for their beauty. One small dial on the face noted whether it was day or night, and tiny alicorn Princesses prodded the sun and moon into position at need: something which struck her as an interesting artistic interpretation. But when she'd looked at the rather long braided metal cord, seen the sheer density of the watch and the amount of protection given to tiny internal gears...
Minotaurs possessed hands. Their nation had access to more metal than just about any other location on Menajeria, and the species could supposedly display a collective mindset of 'So what happens if we try this?' According to both Nightwatch and the Sergeant, the traits combined to give Mazein the rough majority of the world's mechanical engineers. Minotaurs produced technology -- but they were creations which often worked by clockwork alone: no electricity, and getting a watch to run on steam meant putting a tiny boiler against your wrist. Still, they did what they could within those limits: complex calculators, limited-function automatons. And they were practical.
The watch was heavy and dense because it had been manufactured by minotaurs. But the species had its own way of considering the world, and so there were two reasons for the timepiece to come with a metal cord. One was to offer the option of pocket use, and the other was that in a moment of crisis, it took very few carefully-measured seconds to turn the whole thing into a fast-spinning flail.
It gave Cerea a timepiece. (It also provided the chance to carefully ask Nightwatch about the seller -- who had unfortunately been a male.) Something she could use to judge the true passage and, when her own terrors were at their worst, provided a localized source for declaiming lies.
Because fear distorted time.
There were only a few days left before she would meet the children, and every identifiable section of that duration seemed determined to turn its own segment into a lashing variable.
She trained, and those hours often passed far too quickly. There were always Guards coming in and out now -- but she quickly realized the actual pool was limited. Some of that was due to the schedule: it was unreasonable to expect too many Lunars. But a portion of the rest was her fault, because there had to be those who didn't want to be close to a centaur unless it was absolutely necessary. Realistically, she was fairly certain that when it came to falsely overriding that desire by direct order, the Sergeant could only shout at ninety percent of the palace during one go.
Guards arrived, participated in the training. She learned how to move alongside them (and, rather frequently, under). Formations were reviewed, considered in terms of her potential presence, and were then carefully adjusted. There was a day where the Sergeant created the thin outline of a building in the track's center oval, bare suggestions of walls surrounding borrowed furniture, and then had her evaluate the area for potential danger. (It had been scent which betrayed the occupant of the carefully-dug section of trapdoor-sealed tunnel, and she'd taken some small pleasure in extracting a rather surprised earth pony from the ambush hole.) A separate lesson covered moving through a simulated street, and flowerpots regularly crashed down from false ledges: the task was to make sure none of them hit whoever was designated as Princess. Catching was an option. So was taking the hit with your own body. And regretfully, ponies had discovered terracotta, even when working with a fully-separated terra.
(That exercise reminded her of a cheap videogame, something with a liquid-crystal display and no actual frames of animation because each frame was in a separate location. Press down on a tiny recessed area, perhaps with a hairpin, and every black image would appear at the same time, showing how the tiny character didn't actually transition between states. Press twice and the whole thing would probably fracture under the pressure, because it was another category where the gaps mostly received what humans had no further use for, sometimes in bulk. Cerea's foulest literary curse was Reader's Digest Condensed Edition: Papi, forever trying to figure out ways of working modern controllers without true hands, occasionally reacted to hard-coded current-generation foulness with a near-screech of "TIGER ELECTRONICS!")
They were still working on having her fighting against ponies, only now there were actual ponies to fight. Moving, thinking targets, and it was something which wound up shaming her because she couldn't adjust fast enough. The review on inducing backlash was especially bad. A unicorn who was trying to gallop in fairly random patterns was considerably harder to hit than a wooden statue, and remained so no matter how quickly she spun the sling.
"About three out of every ten," the Sergeant had announced when it was over, with the recently-targeted unicorn in question slowly making her way to the showers under a fast-dipping sun. Part of that lack of speed was due to exhaustion: the remainder was produced by armor. A stray sling stone could potentially hit anything, and so the pony had more of her body covered than usual. The eyes were partially masked by metal grills, and when it came to the horn... the intent was to show that Cerea could potentially induce backlash: not to cause inconvenience through injury through actually setting it off. The pony's helmet came with a built-in cone of metal thoroughly covering the horn. This was something which prevented all normal casting, because the corona couldn't pass through a fully solid object. It also stopped backlash, as there was no way to reach the actual horn.
The helmet was enchanted to randomly display a false corona, at varying levels of intensity: the metal simply (and randomly) glowed with the necessary layering. And when that happened, Cerea was supposed to hit it with a sling stone.
"Got a formal name for that tactic?" the old stallion inquired. "Galloping around the target at a distance while you try to center your aim?"
"Circle-strafing," the girl wearily replied. Something which hadn't --
"Three out of ten," the Sergeant semi-repeated. "For a moving target the size of a horn, with you on the gallop, while the helmet was launching bursts of light at you. Sling in one hand, sword in the other."
She closed her eyes.
"Which, in actual combat," Cerea stated, "means my opponent got seven spells off."
She felt the pressure of his gaze, opened her eyes again...
...he was looking at her, and that was all he was doing. He just... looked, and his eyes were as unreadable as the new scent.
"Ambidexterity," he eventually recovered. "You don't have it."
She reluctantly shook her head. "I've been training for it. Most centaurs do. But I still have a dominant side --"
"-- sling was in the dominant hand?"
Cerea managed a nod. She was still learning the weapon: trying to master it from the weaker side would have slowed everything down.
"Sword in the off-hand," he added. "Deflected four of the seven which got launched. And you had to keep sheathing it in order to load new stones."
"Seven out of every ten spells got off," Cerea adjusted the review. "Three of those got through. I'm still dead. My Princess is exposed and vulnerable. I know it's not good enough. I'm sorry --"
The strange expression hadn't changed.
"How many spells do you think a Guard is supposed to block?"
Automatically, because there could only be one right answer. "All of them."
"Like blocking every insect in a swarm," the Sergeant suggested.
"What if somepony's allergic to stings? If I miss one..."
He'd backed up a little, just to favor her with that strange expression a little more directly.
"Usually run that drill with unicorns against unicorns," he told her. "Levitating rocks, or whatever else they can find. How do you think they do by comparison?"
"Better," was equally automatic. "The field would give them more control. Can they adjust the stone in flight?"
"If they want to hold onto it," the Sergeant readily admitted. "And their field dexterity is high enough. But it's best to give it some speed and then let go, because a stone moving freely means their field can go down again. Guards train in fast-casting. Keep the corona up just long enough to do something, then drop it. You can't backlash a dark horn. But you're working with a sling. That changes things. Three out of ten on a narrow moving target --"
She beat him to it for two reasons: because it was true, and voicing it herself might block the fully-justified shout. "-- isn't good enough."
But the next words didn't emerge as a shout. They were soft and somehow, that was worse.
"What if I told you," the Sergeant quietly said, "that thirty percent was higher than expected for the first time running the full drill?"
She shook her head.
"It doesn't matter. Unicorns against unicorns. There's no real comparison. Anything less than a hundred percent is a dead Princess --"
One patterned forehoof stomped against the ground. She swore he was keeping a succession of half-hidden, partially-hollowed stones around the area just to get the extra echo.
"Go wash up," he told her. "We'll run it again tomorrow."
Her shoulders slumped. She slowly began to trot towards the barracks as the sun dipped lower in the sky. Another day of proving her unsuitability was drawing to a close, and it had brought her that much closer to --
"Sergeant?"
"Tomorrow, Recruit. When you're fresh. After you've gotten some sleep, and thought about things --"
"I'm... going to meet the children soon."
Her ears twisted towards the sound of the steady breaths.
"Cleared the time for it," the Sergeant simply stated.
"Is there... anything you can tell me? About what I should do?"
The pace of the rib cage never changed, as she waited under a sun which now felt too cold.
"Never had foals," the old stallion told her. "Haven't been one for a long time. Don't really meet them that often."
There was another scent now, and the wind just barely carried it to her. Something which made her want to move all the faster, because his only legacy was those who had passed through his training. Off the course, into the armor and then, so very often, into the gardens.
"What I would have done as a colt, same circumstances, if I met a centaur..." It was now possible to hear him thinking it over. "Evaluation. I would have made sure I had a plan. What to say, and what to do if I didn't get the right answers. So try to have your own. What you think they might do, and how you'll respond. But it's going to be like every plan, Recruit. It breaks when things start. Plan, adjust when you need to. But be ready to make it up as you go along. Because I remember a little about what it was like, being a colt. When the world is chaos, and you have to tell yourself it isn't because that's how any of part of it can make sense."
She listened to the deep breath.
"They know they're going to be scared going in," he told her. "You have to figure out how they've decided to manage it. The kind of lies they're telling themselves, so they can pretend they've got any control at all. Because thinking like a kid means remembering a lot of fear. Hit the showers."
And she did.
She could remember her own fear: even without knowing what the pony lifespan was, Cerea was completely certain that she was closer to those years than the Sergeant, and so the memory was clear, detailed, and -- layered. There had been a lot to be afraid of, and she could draw on a portion of empathy because there had been ways in which some of that terror had centered on herself. That she didn't fit in with the herd, thought too differently, should have never had certain thoughts at all...
(There had been a plan. It had fallen apart.)
She understood why the children were afraid of her. But she couldn't look at herself from the outside. She didn't know what they were truly thinking...
(She would learn.)
Guards coming in and out -- but Squall had a part to play in most sessions, and the scent of his frustration helped to keep her alert because it wasn't just about hitting unicorns who were on the move. Pegasi were a greater challenge, and came with an even more dismal miss rate. He wasn't her only airborne target, of course -- but he did have the dubious honor of being the one whom she hit the most, and any responding sparks of anger had to stay entirely within his eyes.
There was discussion of restraints: putting a metal cone over a unicorn's horn in order to block magic. Guards occasionally carried a few, and using one against a powerful specimen could be like trying to cap a geyser which was aiming every high-pressure gush directly at you. She had the benefit of being able to deflect some of the bursts with the sword, but getting the thing on could turn into a two-handed operation. Fortunately, the buckles were enchanted to close themselves.
She began to study maps of the palace, and so learned that each Princess had her own section: there was a common area connecting the marble wings. Some building functions were duplicated, while others were unique to their ruler. Multiple channels existed for getting to various sections in a hurry and because they all had to accommodate the white horse, they could host a centaur. Figuring out how to open the secret passages was another lesson...
The training offered endless distractions and when that wasn't taking place, she had the forge. (Barding mostly seemed to treat children as an annoyingly necessary biological intermediary stage which was required before you could put armor on something.) After those hours concluded, there was time with Nightwatch, and...
...she hadn't meant to eavesdrop. She had simply been taking a different path to the barracks, putting her increasing knowledge of the palace into practice by choosing a route which might avoid more ponies. And she'd heard the Sergeant before she scented him, followed by picking up on Nightwatch...
The girl had turned back, trying to minimize the impact of her hooves as she turned: making it sound like somepony with much less mass was using that passage. Because she had made out but a single word, and she understood the dual nature of her relationship with the little knight. The friend (somehow, her friend) -- and the superior officer, because that word had been evaluation. The Sergeant likely wanted Nightwatch's opinion on Cerea's training, and she wouldn't listen to any of those words. She didn't want to know what the associated scents were. At her core, she understood that Nightwatch would be honest, and...
...she didn't want to hear any of it. Not then, and not when she reached the barracks twenty minutes late and found the little pegasus upon the self-assigned bunk, within a personally-created, somewhat unsubtle upwind draft. Not after she measured out the six minutes required before Nightwatch could truly look at her again, followed by both centaur and pegasus very carefully failing to discuss it for the rest of the evening.
Time was passing: she had a means of measuring that now. The barracks were just about clean, although the question of centaur bedding arrangements had yet to find any degree of long-term answer. Somepony had replaced the soap dispensers in the bathroom, and the removal of dividing walls had provided a restroom trench large enough for her. Two mirrors had been adjusted in height. It felt like she was approaching the end of her training, with so many sessions now being spent in review. The armor... it was down to the helmet and breastplate, both of which she had to do herself. Her hours were filled, and some of them had to be filled with rest because that was what the doctors continued to order.
But every day which passed brought her that much closer to the children.
She woke up in the middle of the night, driven back to wakefulness by the whips of young screams. After the trembling stopped, her eyes would close again, she would force her breathing to slow, listening to nothing more than her own heartbeat for what felt like hours... and then she would open her eyes again, flick the lid on the watch, and two minutes would have passed.
Training sessions raced by at a rate which made her lunge after them, desperate to catch fleeing seconds by a virtual tail and drag them back so she could go through it all over again. Each hammer swing in the forge could take an hour: longer if Barding had questions. The nights dragged, while any sleep she found was still over far too quickly. The pages on the calendar kept turning, and she had one of those now because it was another means of trying to see through the distortions. She thought about how moons were twenty-eight days long, wondered what kind of parallel allowed an hour to be an hour, and her mind refused to let any one second equal another. She trained, she learned, she did her best to deal with fear both caused and felt, and no part of that permitted her personal sense of time to simply flow.
There was an hour in the barracks (or five days, if left to herself while waiting for Nightwatch, with a thousand scream-filled futures clashing in her head) when she'd had a surprise, because any visitor had to count as one. The dark blue unicorn stallion had quietly stepped in, red corona bearing paperwork, and Crossing Guard had told her there were more forms to fill out.
His head had been down when he'd said that. They'd never finished, and...
...neither of them talked about it.
He'd asked questions, transcribed her answers. Gathered up the results within what looked to be slow-sagging bubbles, started towards the exit --
"Mr. Guard?"
-- stopped. Still facing the door, not looking at her.
"I'm supposed to be meeting the children soon." Hesitant, worried, but -- she was running out of ponies to ask, and he was there. "I was wondering if you had... any advice."
His fur rustled as the muscles underneath shifted. The dark tail twitched --
-- the bubbles drifted left, and paperwork was deposited on a nearby empty bunk. The field winked out, and the middle-aged stallion slowly turned to face her.
"I need to talk for a few minutes here," the head of Immigration stated. "You listen."
She nodded --
-- and his eyes briefly closed.
"Unless you need to say something where I should be listening," he added.
Another, more uncertain nod, and his tail gradually steadied.
"Part of my job is monitoring/keeping tabs on the ones who come in, and that can keep going until the day they become citizens," he carefully said, and she wondered if it was the disc which made it seem as if each syllable was being granted a personal weight. "I'm in charge of them. It means I'm part of their lives, and it also means that... I don't get too close. We're not friends. It's not a good idea, letting it be that personal. It's harder to do the job when it becomes too personal."
She was resting near another bunk, one which they'd been using as an improvised desk. Some of the blankets had a few fresh ink stains, and it was easier to look at them than his eyes.
"You said you had something like an immigration officer, as an exchange student," the unicorn abruptly kicked in. "What was she like?"
Cerea tried to think of the most tactful way to summarize Kuroko Smith. Then she remembered that the government official was a world away, and found herself wrestling with the choice to deliberately fail.
"The title was Cultural Exchange Coordinator," the centaur tried. "But it was a branch of immigration. She was usually..." Hesitated. "...absent."
The stallion did the worst thing. He waited, and it forced her to keep talking.
"She didn't want to get involved that much," Cerea reluctantly said. "She would visit the household to get a meal, or --" she didn't want to picture the adult female flirting again "-- talk to our host. But she hated filling out forms, or making sure we had all of our identification, or -- anything: she hated anything which created work. She kept passing things off to other people, because she said there were too many liminals to look after and it would help if a few of us looked after ourselves." The words were coming more quickly. "Anything so she could get back to her bath all the faster, right after she grabbed a full plate out from under someone's nose and took it home with her." They never got the plates back. "But there were a lot of us, not very many officials, and..."
This time, her head dipped. Shoulders slumped, and she found herself looking at the sweater-clad swell of her breasts. The current bra was getting a little tight. She had to ask somepony to tell Ms. Garter about that. Maybe an adjustment could be made without a fresh round of measurements. And as for making the armor...
...it was fear, and so she recognized the steady deceleration of time as it scraped across the field of deliberate internal delay.
"...our household was... one of the worst, when it came to creating trouble," she softly finished. "She usually showed up too late, but -- she almost always tried to show up. I think -- in her own way, she cared, as much as she could. But she was just tired. And... it was easier to make us do so much of the work because that way, at least it got done."
Except for those aspects of bureaucracy which no household of liminal girls could manage. Just for starters, there had been no designation or category for 'slimes' when the exchange program had started, the species had existed as bare rumor within every gap and when it came to the unexpected, confirming discovery of Suu, Cerea wasn't sure Ms. Smith had ever filed any amount of paperwork.
She brought her head up just in time to see the stallion nod.
"I can understand being tired," he told her. "I'm tired most of the time. But I still would have fired her. Because you don't get the job unless you're willing to do the work. And that's what it is: work. It can't be too personal, not for me, because -- there's so many of them. Even with how few non-ponies there are in the total population, this is the capital: we've got our share, plus the shares for some of the other settled zones, and then you have to kick in the embassies and all the conflicts which arise when new members of those staffs don't know how to interact with ponies. And that goes both ways. Canterlot is -- active. So it can't be personal."
He hesitated again.
"Not for me. But with my kids..."
His lips abruptly quirked.
"I'm still trying to figure out your expressions," the unicorn admitted. "Was that surprise?"
Cerea reluctantly nodded.
"I'm married," the stallion shrugged. "I love Tarter. She loves me. Still, for some reason. There's a galloping consequence for that or, for our house, three of them. And some of the immigrants arrive as families, with kids of their own. I can't get too close, and their kids are just a few more charges I have to look out for. But there's something to be said for getting outside of the little neighborhoods, because we all have to speak with each other eventually. And it means that for things like Homecoming, when the new ones are trying to learn our holidays..."
Another pause. He pulled a slow breath in between his teeth, stretching out the oxygen.
"They're a long way from their old homes," he told her. "And they don't quite have a new one yet. So Tarter sets extra places at the table, makes room in the kitchen so the guests can prepare their own dishes. Sometimes we need new kinds of tables. And when the meal is over, the kids always wind up in the yard. I've had a lot of different hoofprints in that yard, along with a few paws, talons, and feet. Different shapes. Different species. Sometimes you get a divot in the dirt, or a rough patch where everyone tumbled on top of each other. So what I've learned about kids is... the shapes are different. The cultures need to be sorted out more than I'd like. But once they start laughing..."
Clear eyes focused on her. Directly upon hers, without hesitation, as the miasma of fear found a moment of ebb.
"...when they're laughing," Crossing Guard stated, "all kids are the same. So when you meet that class, treat them as children. They're pony fillies and colts, scared ones, and that means they might not react in the ways you're used to -- but somewhere under the full-body fur and local lack of arms is a kid. Give them a chance to show you that."
He began to turn away from her --
-- stopped.
Not quite casually, "What's your full name?"
She stared at him.
"The disc just renders 'centaur' twice." No matter how badly time might be distorted, there was always a moment available for blaming her mother. "It doesn't matter what I say, unless it's --
"-- not what I meant," he quietly interrupted. "And... my fault on the phrasing. It's the disc. I've never heard your language, because all I get is Equestrian. So I've never heard you say your name. And I need to put something other than 'centaur' on the paperwork. So what I'm asking for is this: take off the disc. Then say your name. That'll give me the phonetics, and I can put that into the forms." One more pause, with his eyes steady again. "I also want to see how close I can get to saying it back."
She hadn't thought about that: whether the pony throat could manage any degree of French -- or Japanese, English, any of the myriad languages which had been created by humans. But then, she had to learn their means of speaking: they had no need for hers.
...except for this.
Her right hand came up, carefully separated silver from skin as the unicorn watched. She waited until the final wire tip lost contact with her sore ear, and took a slow breath.
"Centorea Shianus."
The unicorn blinked a few times. Brought his left forehoof up, and awkwardly rubbed at his throat until the keratin pushed out something halfway between neigh and pained groan.
"Shhhyenerrrrea Hzenannust," the pony just barely said, and that after a gigantic offering of aural charity.
The girl didn't quite manage to hold back the wince, and did little better with the blush which was so close behind. The disc went back on.
"I'll figure out a spelling," Crossing Guard decided, and the blue eyes rolled up. "What you do to vowels..." Turned again as his field gathered up the paperwork, and headed for the door.
She began to gather the ink-stained blankets for cleaning, having already decided it was something she needed to do herself because the palace laundry (which was in the Solar wing, and had but one hidden passage nearby) surely had enough labors, even in a society with so little clothing. It meant she wasn't looking at him when he began to step into the hallway, and so had to twist her ears to catch the final words.
"They're all just kids..."
She would have occasion to remember that, as the final hours rushed and stalled and did their best to grind against skin and fur. Time passing at a rate which the fear insisted was variable, while never stopping. Nothing she could do would prevent the meeting, she felt as if she would have given almost anything to postpone it a little longer, and whatever she somehow had left over from that payment could be used to purchase something she could say...
And then it was the day of the meeting. The morning, with time running out and no amount of desperate hope or prayer able to buy her so much as a single second or syllable. Knowing only that something would go wrong, because something like it had happened once before, she had been involved, and it had gone wrong. Any degree of precedent could only work against her.
But Crossing Guard had been right. In some aspects, regardless of species or world, all children were alike.
There were ways in which all children were monsters.